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GISMA Business School and Grenoble Ecole de Management open campus in Berlin
Thursday, 26th January, 2017

Berlin, 26 January 2017 –GISMA Business School today officially opened its new Berlin campus, where it will deliver highly-ranked postgraduate programmes in collaboration with Grenoble Ecole de Management (GEM), the French leading business school with campuses worldwide. The development marks a significant growth for the Hannover-based business school as it consolidates its presence in the German market.

Centrally located on Potsdamer Strasse in the cosmopolitan Schöneberg area, the 1,600 sq. m. campus will bring together GEM’s academic excellence and GISMA’s postgraduate student experience. The site will offer the structure, connections, and networking opportunities that domestic and international postgraduate students greatly benefit from, as well as good transport links to enable them to make the most of the world-famous Berlin experience.

Established in 1999 as an initiative to deliver first-class international postgraduate education in the heart of the Lower Saxony region, GISMA had among its founders former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, as well as local CEOs and bankers. During its consolidation years, the school had the support of 39 German businesses such as Volkswagen and Continental AG, as well as the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Leibniz University Hannover.

Since being acquired by Global University Systems in 2013, GISMA has gone through significant expansion, growth, and development. As well as building new academic partnerships, the school has received investment to strengthen its operations, leadership, and student services. The school expanded its course portfolio and built partnerships including an academic agreement with Porto Business School, through which it delivers the double-accredited Magellan MBA in Hannover.

The new campus was opened by President of Association of MBAs (AMBA) Sir Paul Judge. A leading businessman and chairman for numerous organisations, Sir Paul highlighted the multiculturalism of Berlin as a study destination in his keynote speech: “Berlin has the highest concentration of higher education institutions in Germany. There are about 165,000 students studying in Berlin, fifteen-percent of those from overseas. And Germany is in fact the favourite non-English-speaking country for international students, whose number has increased by almost a half since 2009.”

Working exclusively with internationally recognised and sector-leading universities, GISMA has been offering AMBA-accredited MBAs on its campuses since 2011. According to GISMA Managing Director, Dr Thorsten Thiel, the new campus in Berlin is the natural next step to enable the school to continue supporting the new German economy.

“Our ambition is to provide Berlin's fast-growing service industries across all clusters and sectors with young, fresh talent as well as to offer the necessary tools for our entrepreneurial graduates to take their ideas off the ground and launch their own businesses,” said Dr Thiel. "Germany is a very open and dynamic market and Berlin offers the ideal infrastructure, with the cultural diversity and connections to other European hubs that domestic and international students seek.”

“We are very proud to be working with our partners from Grenoble on this initiative to bring an exclusive portfolio of highly-ranked programmes to Berlin. The Grenoble Ecole de Management MBA will be one of just a handful of triple-accredited MBAs in the whole of Germany and this makes our offer completely unique,” added Dr Thiel.

Santiago Garcia, Dean and Director of Grenoble Graduate School of Business, the international school of GEM, said: “Our collaboration with GISMA will allow our students to enjoy the best of two worlds: the prestige of our degree programmes and the corporate connections that a reputed German business school provides. For our students, this opens a new opportunity to study in an English-speaking environment whilst becoming familiar with the language, culture, and business of the capital of Europe’s economic powerhouse.”

Global Hub

The new site will also serve as a model for a more ambitious ‘global hub’ of education institutions. The goal is to establish Berlin operations for other institutions within the Global University Systems network, as well as their academic partners.

Professor Maurits van Rooijen, Chief Academic Officer at Global University Systems, said: “This is a major step in our ambition to create a global hub for high quality education in Berlin. We do not just want to offer degrees, but also enable our students to use Berlin as an extension of their learning experience, whilst offering local students a place to interact with the world. Our aim is to boost the careers of those with high potential and of those who are ready for the next big step on the career ladder, both locally and globally. We think Berlin is the best place for it. Working closely with employers is at the heart of what GISMA is and this will remain our philosophy in Berlin.”

The first school to join GISMA in the German capital will be The Language Gallery, which is due to launch certified language programmes in the coming months.

About GISMA Business School

GISMA, the German International School for Management and Administration, was founded in 1999 to support the business community of Lower Saxony in its internationalization efforts by providing international management education to young professionals and executives from Germany and all over the world. Since then, GISMA has graduated a global community of alumni who have accelerated their careers in Germany and abroad with a sound foundation in management theory, diverse practical experience, and invaluable connections with fellow graduates and other GISMA alumni. GISMA classes are taught by expert faculty from around the world who bring both academic and practical experience to the classroom.

About Grenoble Ecole de ManagementEstablished in 1984 by Grenoble’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Grenoble Ecole de Management is one of the best French (top 6) and European (top 20) business schools. Each year, Grenoble Ecole de Management trains approximately 8000 students and executives, delivering over 50 national and international programs from the undergraduate to the Doctoral level, on several campuses worldwide.

Accredited by EQUIS, AACSB and AMBA, a member of the Conférence des Grandes Ecoles, and regularly ranked in French and international rankings, Grenoble Ecole de Management is one of only a few business schools worldwide to hold the triple accreditation crown, a clear indication of the quality of its activities.

Based in Grenoble, the French capital of the Alps and of innovation, Grenoble Ecole de Management has developed a unique expertise in Management of Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship. With this specificity, the School is a founding member of the global innovation campus, GIANT (Grenoble Innovation for Advanced New Technologies), which represents a 1.3 billion euros investment over 5 years.

The school’s vision is to become one of the most influential and inspiring Business Schools in the world, through its ability to impact and inspire the world of education, businesses, stakeholders and society in general. Its mission is to accompany corporate performance by providing the knowledge, skills and talent to meet the economic challenges of today and tomorrow.

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